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"We had something really really polished to present," Wedgwood recalls. "And at this point we were introduced to [Id Software co-owner] Kevin Cloud, and to Jonathan Moses of Activision, who was the producer on Return To Castle Wolfenstein." This meeting was to prove fruitful, and was a fortunate turn of events for the newly formed company, now called Splash Damage. They had been relying on the soon-to-be-bankrupt NOW TV Quake-match broadcasts for their income, and the money intended for new, serviced offices would rapidly dry up. Splash Damage began their new direction by crafting some multiplayer maps for Return To Castle Wolfenstein, paid for by a UK telecoms company. These were soon to be the most popular third party maps for the game. It was clear to both Splash Damage and their friends at Id that the team was ready for a more ambitious commercial project. Soon the young company was working with Id and Nerve Software to create the most popular first party map for RTCW, released in a bundle of official maps. This led directly into their work on the first major commercial game project: Return To Castle Wolfenstein - Enemy Territory.
The original Enemy Territory project had been intended as a quasi-sequel to the original game, with both single player and multiplayer elements. Accordingly, Splash Damage would handle the multiplayer game. As it turned out, however, they were lucky to see the project completed at all. Activision cancelled the release, and it was only because Id decided that the multiplayer project should be released for free that Splash Damage's work ever saw the light of a gamer's screen. Funded for three months beyond the project's cancellation, Enemy Territory was given away for free by Activision. Wedgwood says that he has Id's history of community relations to thank for this: in a manner reminiscent of their early shareware releases, the company had created goodwill by giving away a high-end gaming product for nothing. For Wedgwood meanwhile the process had been essential and galvanic. He had recognised the value of the original multiplayer game created by Nerve Software, and regarded the innovations in Return To Castle Wolfenstein as important to the entire first-person canon. "We knew about class-based combat, but RTCW just had so many innovations. Having everybody spawn together in spawn waves, with a spawn timer, meant that everyone arrived together and you had a higher chance of co-ordinating the team. It also had charge bars that allowed them to balance various classes strengths and weaknesses. People rapidly accepted the idea that charge bars controlled how often you could fire something, rather than depending on some kind of reload. The combination of spawn waves and charge bars meant you could have asymmetrical maps that worked, something that you would never have thought from playing games like Team Fortress." For Wedgwood, multiplayer combat games represent the most intense and exciting of gameplay. These feelings have fed into all his work, and all his gaming. He described the excitement of playing Ultima Online as a PvP game, and his ultimate lack of interest in things like World Of Warcraft. His infectious enthusiasm reminded me that despite all the chatter going on about World Of Warcraft, Second Life or the consoles going online, there is still a strata of gamers for whom PCs, with their competition and combat, are the bread and butter of gaming. Wedgwood is one of these people, and his decisions in hiring staff directly from the FPS communities reflects that focus. "The large majority of people here have come here as their first development company, sometimes their first real job," says Wedgwood. He has worked hard to make that first experience a rewarding and stable one for his youthful staff. Splash Damage was Wedgwood's first game development house too, but not his first business. "I tried to get some businesses off the ground in my twenties, so I guess I've always had this entrepreneurial spirit, but Splash Damage was the first business I started that wasn't started to make money. It was started because I was passionate about what we were going to do as a company, and it sounded like a better job than I might be doing as an IT guy. I knew when we started Splash Damage what had caused my companies or other companies I had worked for to fail, so we've always had a strict mission to do everything by the book." Wedgwood would not be shy about getting aid where he could. Taking full advantage of the UK's government help for small businesses, he applied for and received help from a business advisor. "He turned up and we had three desks and a load of computer hardware, and yet for some reason he stayed on as our business advisor for over a year. We did everything by the book and hey, it worked. The business advisor showed us how to get a human resources consultant, because of the complexity of contracts and confidentiality agreements." |
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